Dark Workshop is a first-person dark-fantasy shop sim.
Step behind the counter of your own dark-fantasy emporium, where adventurers, alchemists, and creatures of uncertain allegiance come to spend their gold. You set the prices, stock the shelves, and manage the chaos. Whether anyone leaves satisfied is largely up to you.
A Market That Never Sits Still
The world outside your door does not cooperate. Plagues sweep the village and double the demand for anything medicinal. War bands ride through and drain your weapons stock in an afternoon. A witch-hunter's edict reaches town, and suddenly every potion you sell is a liability. World events continually reshape supply, demand, and supplier availability, forcing you to order wisely during the rumor phase, stockpile ahead, and adapt when things go awry. The market is alive, and it is not on your side.
Craft Everything Yourself
Order ingredients from a network of shadowy suppliers — a swamp witch, a grave digger, a shady merchant, and others who unlock as your fame grows. Take those ingredients to your crafting stations, brew volatile potions in the alchemy lab, hammer out enchanted blades at the forge, and stock the results at the right price. Every recipe has a cost. Every item has a margin. Getting it right takes practice.
Explore Your Expanding Workshop
Your shop begins small. Behind locked doors lie chambers waiting to be reclaimed: a cave full of collectable ingredients, a fog-shrouded swamp, a graveyard with its own unusual supply line, a forge smelling faintly of sulfur, and a library whose contents are best left unexamined. Each room you unlock is a new space to walk through, stock, and eventually run as part of the business. The workshop grows with you.
Guests You Did Not Invite
Not every visitor comes through the front door politely. Thieves case your shelves and slip items into their coats while you are distracted — you can confront them yourself with a hammer, or hire a guard zombie to handle the situation. Strange travelers appear between shop days with unusual requests and stranger backstories, offering modest rewards for playing along or a quiet insult if you decline. And occasionally a bulk buyer with deep pockets empties an entire category from your shelves, which is either excellent news or a disaster, depending on what you were planning.
Build, Hire, and Automate
Place shelves, racks, and furniture to shape your shop and improve its reputation. Hire zombie employees to cover the repetitive work — a stocker who restocks shelves, a collector who gathers ingredients from outdoor zones, a cashier who handles the register so you can focus elsewhere, and a guard who discourages theft with varying degrees of subtlety.
Fame, Progression, and the Long Game
Serve enough customers, weather enough events, and fulfill enough contracts, and your fame grows. Higher fame unlocks better suppliers, rarer recipes, and more dangerous events. Grow it high enough, and an ancient Grimoire opens a skill tree of permanent upgrades across crafting, shop management, and employee effectiveness. The workshop you end with looks very little like the one you started with.
Features
- First-person shopkeeping in a dark-fantasy world
- World events that reshape supply, demand, and supplier access day by day
- Deep crafting across alchemy, forging, and more
- Explorable rooms to unlock and expand into
- Dynamic market with daily price fluctuations and supply pressure
- Thieves who steal, and multiple ways to stop them
- Random encounters with travelers between shop days
- Zombie employees: stocker, collector, cashier, guard
- Contracts and bulk buyers that test your inventory planning
- Skill tree accessible through an ancient Grimoire
- Build and decorate to shape your shop and boost renown
